Saturday, 15 September 2018

Weekend Reading - A Corker

Reed: read

An America writer well worth checking out from time to time is Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He's an honest leftie with a genuine, well-considered ideology; and as such is highly illuminating, indeed scathing, on identity politics - in particular, that highly significant segment that is the US 'race' industry - as a malign and ego-driven diversion from the proper lefty business of pursuing the wellbeing of the working class as a whole.My recommendation for the weekend is this essay:The Trouble With Uplift - How black politics succumbed to the siren song of the racial voice.

Uncomfortable stuff for many on the empty-headed, virtue-signalling, gesture-politicking left. His own focus is of course clear and specific, but it's easy to extend his arguments to (e.g.) the 'feminist' obsession over whether Jo Brand gets paid as much as Paul Merton. Some choice extracts:

... projections of successes for the rich and famous as generic racial victories depend on a sleight-of-hand that treats benefits for any black person as benefits for all black people ... In addition to the annual contretemps over whether blacks win enough of the most prestigious Oscars, recent racial controversies in the art world illustrate how easily the narrowest guild concerns can masquerade as burning matters of racial justice

... “racial rent-seeking” - a curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse, proposing a trickle-down model of racial progress, anchored in the mysticism of organic black community ... neoliberal race leaders stage the beguiling fantasy that individual “entrepreneurialism” is the key path to rising above one’s circumstances—i.e., the standard American social myth that obscures the deeper need to combat systemic inequalities

... we never reckon with the truly disturbing presumption that any black person who can gain access to the public microphone and performs familiar rituals of “blackness” should be recognized as expressing significant racial truths and deserves our attention. This presumption rests on the unexamined premise that blacks share a common, singular mind that is at once radically unknowable to non-blacks and readily downloaded by any random individual setting up shop as a racial voice. And despite what all of our age’s many heroic narratives of individualist race-first triumph may suggest to the casual viewer, that premise is the essence of racism